Code[ish]

Getaway is a startup that offers short-term rentals. They specialize in ensuring that the domiciles they offer are far outside city limits and often inaccessible to Internet and cellular connectivity. Zach Feldman, their VP of Technology, chats with Jason Salaz, a member of the Heroku Support Team, about the unique challenges this requirement imposes. For example, rather than providing a physical...

Heroku Front-end Engineer Jamie White sits down with René Winkelmeyer, a developer evangelist at Salesforce, to talk about the company's commitment to advancing web components. Web components are a collection of standardized web and browser APIs designed to overcome some of the limitations with the design of the Internet, particularly when it comes to page rendering. Web components exist outside o...

The web started off weird, and there's a wonderful and concerted effort to ensure that, at least parts of it, stay that way. Heroku designer Charlie Gleason and lead strategist Stephen Barlow dive into their experiences working on side projects—small, silly, funny, and emotive vignettes on the web—that span random Arrested Development episode selectors , Kanye West browser-based mini games , colla...

Chris Castle continues his conversation with Claire Lee, the head of the early stage group at Silicon Valley Bank. In this half, Claire begins by providing hard data that indicates companies which are founded by individuals from diverse backgrounds are wildly profitable. She goes on to say that conversely, the members in the top VCs firms are of a disproportionate make-up. She concludes that in or...

Chris Castle sits down with Claire Lee, the head of the early stage group at Silicon Valley Bank. Claire discusses the various startups she is involved with across various sectors, such as cleantech, fintech, and healthcare. Much of the conversation revolves around her experience at Recode's Code Conference 2019 and three lessons she took away from her attendance. First, media platform companies s...

Matte Noble is a Senior Software Engineer at Sentry, an application with the capability to stitch together different developer tools through their APIs. For example, an exception that occurs in your application can be automatically represented as an item in your project management tool's backlog. On top of this, Sentry provides a platform for tools to also integrate with. Matte identifies his past...

Chris Castle sits down with Shirley Xu, who went through a coding bootcamp, and Eric Chen, who is a recent graduate, to talk about their journey into their first programming jobs at Heroku. For both of them, the experience of programming in a day-to-day role is vastly different than what they experienced at school; namely, rather than analyzing algorithms, they were exposed to Ruby, Rails, and ent...

Josh Aas, the co-founder of the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), is interviewed by Craig Ingram, a Runtime Engineer at Heroku. Amongst other outreach programs, ISRG is in charge of developing Let's Encrypt, which is a Certificate Authority (CA) designed to provide free TLS/SSL certificates to any website on the web. While starting ISRG in 2013, Josh noted that only about a third...

Tyler Montgomery, Trailhead's engineering director, and Shaun Russell, its principal engineer, kick off a conversation with Chris Castle as to how Trailhead came about. One of Salesforce's developer evangelists, Josh Burke, wanted to create some teaching material for classes he taught. The idea was that students wouldn't just read some content and take a quiz; they would perform real actions, such...

Terraform is an open source project to help automate the provisioning of infrastructure resources and services for your application. It integrates with cloud platforms through open source plugins, called providers. Mars Hall is a Heroku engineer that works on the Heroku provider. Rather than using a CLI or a web UI, Terraform provides a platform-agnostic configuration file written in the Hashicorp...

Léonie Watson does many things: she worked on overhauling the UK government's digital services, is on the W3C advisory board, acts as co-chair of the W3C web platform working group, is an advisor for Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project, and also runs the Inclusive Design 24 conference. She also happens to be visually impaired. The show begins with how she went from drama school towards a car...

Designer and front end developer Charlie Gleason and developer David Routen are both on Heroku's marketing team, and both of them transitioned into the world of programming from disparate career paths. For them, moving into tech was about following their passion for creative problem solving. They did so by first creating a plan for what they needed to learn. After viewing several job postings, the...

This episode begins with a roundtable introduction from five Herokai engineers who describe what motiviated them to speak at their first conference. If you're a first-time speaker, it's best to let conference organizers be aware of this, not only because they will support you, but also because they will try to give you a prime time slot in order to boost your message (and spirits). The group then...

For many years, Jeff Dickey was a lead architect for Heroku's CLI tool, which was used by application developers to get their apps deployed to Heroku's platform. He muses on his history with CLIs with Nahid Samsami, a director of product at Heroku, as the two of them worked together on oclif. oclif was designed from the start to be a framework for developers to use when building their own command-...

Francis Lacoste, a Director of Engineering at Heroku, is a longtime meditation practitioner. In 2015, he attended public seminar on mindfulness by the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which was co-founded by a former Google engineer. The workshop emphasized mindfulness as a benefit to businesses by framing the mental health benefits as something that could improve worker productivity....

With the explosive growth of people using, and contributing to, open source projects over the last decade, more and more of us are spending their time reading, writing, and understanding documentation. Heroku's Dev Center is the central hub of documentation for Heroku, covering everything from getting started , to how Heroku works , to extending the platform . It acts as a manual for the entire pl...

Vaidehi Joshi found that many resources on the web about core computer science concepts she wanted to know more about were either too obtuse or too academic. She started a blog, basecs, where she wrote down something she had learned that week--every week--for an entire year. While learning something new in and of itself was a delight, her curiosity led her to question how people learn best. She di...

Heroku splits its units of work into squads; on this episode, we're joined by some members of the squad responsible for the Private Spaces feature. Every member of the squad is remote from one another. The team talks about the pain points around this setup, and the solutions they've set up to minimize feelings of isolation. One tactic has been to keep a long-running meeting URL. Individuals from a...

Chris Castle introduces Becky Jaimes, the product manager for Heroku Dataclips. Dataclips is a feature that allows you to save and version SQL queries against a Postgres database. You can export these queries to JSON or CSV, share them online, or simply access them through an HTTP API. The two discuss the history of Dataclips, namely what its original needs were and how it has evolved. It was orig...

Chris Castle introduces Ryan Townsend, CTO of Shift Commerce, and the two begin by discussing the absolutely abysmal performance of web sites in areas with bad latency: airplanes, the rural countryside, or even just within a crowded cafe or conference. Shift Commerce provides a customizable shopping platform for its customers, who are several big brand retailers. For them, every millisecond of del...

More than half of the employees who work on Heroku are remote or distributed employees, meaning Heroku is what you might call remote-first. Host, Chris Castle, brings together five Heroku employees who have had interesting distributed employee experiences. They share some personal stories and discuss setting boundaries, self-awareness, timezones, and some advice for others interested in distribute...

Isaac Slavitt is the co-founder of DrivenData, a platform for organizations to solicit help from data scientists to solve real-world problems. DrivenData does this by running "competitions" which asks teams to comb through data sets to solve problems for cash rewards. One such competition was Zamba. Researchers set up cameras in African forests and asked engineering experts to develop AI software...

Nickolas Means likes to tell stories. His conference talks [1] often center around a curious anecdote, but he deftly weaves both technical and organizational relevancy into them. Nickolas talks about how he builds a talk from conception to execution and goes over some fundamentals of good presentation slides. The goal is to provide a narrative without overwhelming the user with too much textual co...

Brendon Murphy, CTO of Kajabi , talks about his company's experience with Dataclips [1]. Instead of requiring developers to connect to their database, everyone in the company is able to generate analytics on-the-fly, and they even democratize the information via a Slackbot. Their marketing team is able to get real-time feedback on their campaigns through Lita.io [2] The advantage of using Dataclip...

Andrew Garcia is the co-founder of Goodshuffle , and as one of the first Grails users on Heroku, he worked closely with Joe Kutner, Heroku's Java Platform Owner over the years. They chat with Chris Castle, a developer advocate at Heroku, about Goodshuffle's experience with building a startup on top of the JVM. When building an application, it's often tempting to reach for the latest and greatest t...